Charles Yanofsky, (born April 17, 1925, New York, New York, U.S.—died March 16, 2018), American geneticist who demonstrated the colinearity of gene and protein structures.
Yanofsky was educated at the City College of New York and at Yale University (Ph.D., 1951), where he studied chemistry and microbiology. While at Yale he showed that a suppressor mutation (change in a gene that reverses the visible effects of mutation in a second gene) results in the reappearance of an enzyme that was missing in a mutant organism. He was also part of the research team that first demonstrated that certain mutant genes produce inactive proteins, detectable with the techniques of immunology.
From 1954 to 1958 Yanofsky was at the Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland, Ohio, and then he moved to Stanford University in Palo Alto, California. There, working with the bacterium Escherichia coli, he showed that the sequence of the nitrogen-containing bases forming part of the structure of the genetic material has a linear correspondence to the amino acid sequence of proteins. In his investigations of the biochemical actions of suppressor mutations, Yanofsky and his research group studied mutants of the mold Neurospora crassa and found that suppression resulted in the restoration of the ability to form an active enzyme in a mutant that had previously produced an inactive protein.
During the 1970s Yanofsky turned his focus to the regulation by messenger RNA (mRNA) of the synthesis of tryptophan, an amino acid, in E. coli and Bacillus subtilis. While conducting experiments focused on discerning the mechanisms of this process in 1981, Yanofsky noticed that the cell was able to sense how much tryptophan was present and alter the transcription process accordingly, halting it if necessary. This indicated that mRNA was not the only molecule in the cell capable of regulating transcription; this phenomenon became known as transcriptional attenuation. In 2001 Yanofsky discovered one of the proteins, called anti-TRAP, that regulated the production of tryptophan in B. subtilis. It was thought that the protein was a possible precursor to disease-fighting antibodies in higher organisms.
Yanofsky was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1964), the National Academy of Sciences (1966), and the Royal Society (1985). He served as president of the Genetics Society of America in 1969. Yanofsky also received the National Academy of Sciences’ Selman A. Waksman Award in Microbiology (1972) and the National Medal of Science (2003).
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genetics: DNA and the genetic codeAmerican geneticist Charles Yanofsky showed that the positions of mutant sites within a gene matched perfectly the positions of altered amino acids in the amino acid sequence of the corresponding protein. In 1966 the complete genetic code of all 64 possible triplet coding units (codons), and the…
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gene
Gene , unit of hereditary information that occupies a fixed position (locus) on a chromosome. Genes achieve their effects by directing the synthesis of proteins.… -
protein
Protein , highly complex substance that is present in all living organisms. Proteins are of great nutritional value and are directly involved in the chemical processes essential for life. The importance of proteins was recognized by chemists in the early 19th century, including Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius, who in 1838… -
Yale University
Yale University , private university in New Haven, Connecticut, one of the Ivy League schools. It was founded in 1701 and is the third oldest university in the United States. Yale was originally chartered by the colonial legislature of Connecticut as the Collegiate School and was held at Killingworth and other… -
chemistry
Chemistry , the science that deals with the properties, composition, and structure of substances (defined as elements and compounds), the transformations they undergo, and the energy that is released or absorbed during these processes. Every substance, whether naturally occurring or artificially produced, consists of one or more of the hundred-odd species…
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